A New Approach of Announcement and Avoiding Routing Voids in Wireless Sensor Networks

Communication voids (i.e. holes) have negative impact on real-time routing protocols. To decrease both routing distance and energy consumption in large-scale sensor networks for real time applications, we propose in this paper a novel routing mechanism to make data packets avoid meeting voids in advance. After discovering boundary nodes of a void, our mechanism calculates and announces the center of the void to all nodes inside a circular area around the void. A sender node inside the announce area, at n-hops far from the boundary nodes, uses this information to obtain the appropriate forwarding region and starts countering the void in advance. For that, the sender node selects its forwarding candidate neighbors according to its already obtained forwarding region. The proposed mechanism is fairly simple to implement and saves sensor network resources.